calendars Archives - The Marsid M&M Group Blog

Custom Calendars are a Marketing Secret Weapon for Business

The humble calendar is a bit like a ninja. This unassuming piece of media can sneakily infiltrate the homes and offices of your clients, where it prominently finds itself displayed on desks or walls. Chock full of exciting imagery, promotions, and messaging, this useful promo item not only aids your clients in their day-to-day planning but acts as a personal billboard for your marketing initiatives. Once your calendar finds its way into your client’s spaces, it gives them a front-row seat to your messaging all year long.

Calendars can create incredibly fun, unique, and exciting marketing experiences. Customers also love them, because unlike some of the strange gadgets they get bombarded with at trade shows, these babies serve a practical purpose.

So, let’s discover some exciting ways to take your custom calendar and convert it into a marketing powerhouse.

Plan wisely

Your calendar is an opportunity to connect with your customers 365 times in a year. So, your calendar needs to have some clear goals. Do you want to engage new customers? Retain old ones? Find ways to create more repeat business? Diving into a calendar with a strategy will make it far more successful than just slapping some nice imagery on it and calling it a day.

Go beyond product imagery

Photos of your products are a common choice within the custom calendar sphere and there are plenty of great applications for that. However, a custom calendar that just has stock product imagery isn’t very exciting. When it comes to a picture calendar, there’s a lot you can do with that space. Once you have your marketing goals in mind, think about the message that each month conveys. If you’re a dentist, does a photo of your practice drive clients to book an appointment? Possibly.

Maybe instead, you could collaborate with a graphic designer and content writer to create aesthetically pleasing headers for each month that have inspirational quotes, a funny industry comic strip, or advice.

If product imagery is the way you want to go, try to make the imagery in your calendar unique. Set your products in seasonally correct backgrounds or find ways to delight and surprise your viewers with unexpected photography choices.

Stuff it with promotions

While some customers are pleased as punch to receive a calendar from you, others might need some coercion. It’s never a bad idea to sweeten the deal with some promotions. After all, once you remind them of your service each month, you want something to drive them to your location, right?

For 20 years, Chick-Fil-A was a master case in this area. Not only were their calendars delightful to look at and perfectly branded to their corporate image—they promoted the heck out of their food inside. Their calendars contain coupons and offers every month, which kept their customers exciting and engaged with their calendar all year long.

Brand it and brand it well

A calendar has so much potential for branding, so don’t stop at putting your logo on the front. Slap your emblem on every page of that sucker! No one looks at the cover of a calendar after putting it on the wall, so you’ll want to be sure that your branding is clear each month.

But, remember, branding goes beyond the logo. Your calendar needs to look and sound like your brand, too. That means all copy should fit your brand voice and the colors should match your corporate color scheme.

If you haven’t established a brand yet, today’s the day to start. Consistency among your online, print, and in-store presence is key to winning the trust of customers as they interact with your brand through various platforms.

Use your calendar to combat business slumps

Slow periods exist in every business. Whether it’s right around the holidays, during summer vacation, or maybe right before back-to-school, it seems each business has notoriously slow times that they desperately need a traffic boost during.

So, mark that on your calendar. By that, we mean, add promotions directly to the dates of your calendar that coincide with these slow periods. By doing so, you’ll increase foot traffic during these slow periods.

If you have annual events at your business, be sure to plan their dates while designing your next calendar. Mark popular holidays (and maybe fun, industry-related days like National Hot Dogs day if you’re a restaurant) with a fun graphic and perhaps a special promotion to drive interest in them.

Keep it simple

While we’ve gone through quite a few ideas to make your calendar pop, at the end of the day you’ll need to keep your ideas simple. Every element in your calendar, from imagery to messaging, to the promotions and dates you mark need to have a clear purpose. Your messaging needs to work well within a visual hierarchy each month, which easily draws the eyes from your imagery to the desired interaction with your customer.

The humble calendar takes a little time and patience to put together, but the effort can be well worth it. While other promotional products end up in drawers, your calendar can find its way to prominence in even a cluttered office. While billboards or print ads fizzle to a distant memory soon after a customer’s contact with them, your calendar is a constant visual companion for an entire year.

If you aren’t implementing calendars in your promotional strategy, consider jumping on the train now. With some consideration and planning, your calendar will be the secret weapon to your marketing department always dreamed of.

Are Personalized Calendars Marketing Hidden Gems?

For a moment, forget what the prevailing wisdom is. Because facts are facts, by the end of this blog, we think you will think differently, from when you started.

Looking for a way to promote your business that will engage, remain, and market your products and services is a complicated matter. Will your idea target a professional audience? If, you mail or email a number of informational flyers, will they just view it as another sales item and toss it to the side? That is the real conundrum. Is there a product that will not be thrown away, target your audience, and promote your products and services. The answer may surprise you.

Personalized Calendars?

Calendars are viewed as gifts, not as sales gimmicks, so they are not likely to be thrown away. The fact is, few people actually buy calendars, so receiving one as a gift is often a welcome addition.

Custom calendar printing MMprint.com

Furthermore, it will remain in one’s office or room for 1 year. They can also be personalized, so that, the recipient will genuinely be happy and grateful. It is not surprising that they are overlooked, as most individuals receive their calendar from an organization or business. What other product will remain in plain sight for a full year and offer 12 separate promotions or sales pitches all in a non threatening manner.

Custom calendar printing MMprint.com

OK, that’s great you say, but “MegaCorp” does not even know my company’s name. Well, offering a personalized calendar as a gift will ensure that everyone who receives one, will at the very least, glance at your logo everyday. This is priceless. The individual is not only coming to know your brand, address, and phone phone number, he/she is endorsing you by having that calendar in their office. Also, every person who sits or visits that office will see it as well. Anyone will assume that you have an established relationship with that company.

This is why it is important to design a custom printed calendar. Knowing your target audience will help you design a calendar, which, will help to grow your brand and market effectively. Perhaps, you know an employee is avid golfer, or enjoys hiking. You can cater to their preference and ensure that it ts something they will choose to look at for 12 months.

In 1981 the CAC (Calendar Advertising Council) conducted a telephone survey and found that 70% of calendars were received as gifts, and 85% percent of recipients planned to conduct business with sender of the calendars. That is ROI.

Well, that’s 1981 you say, that does not apply to today’s fast paced, tech savvy world. In the last six years, Calendars have ranged in revenue from 1.07bil to 1.43bil in promotional product sales. That equates to 7.14 share of the $15.64 billion pie of promotional product sales. In the last 6 years, calendars have remained in the top five of promotional products. In addition, look at these statistics reported from ordinary people given promotional or an advertising calendar:

• 74 percent could remember the name of the company advertised
• 72 percent could remember the product or service/message advertised
• 71 percent had done business with the company that gave them the calendar prior to receipt of the complimentary calendar
• 70 percent plan to do business with the company again
• 48 percent had a more favorable impression of the advertiser
• 41 percent have referred a friend to the company that gave them the calendar

Another study showed:

77.6% Plans to do business with the advertiser
48.8% Has referred a friend to the advertiser

That study shows some really interesting information regarding people receiving multiple calendars. Calendars are still relevant and come in many different forms now, from pocket calendars to desk calendars.

All of that would not matter if calendars were not cost effective. It is fairly obvious that TV, radio, or internet ads are much more exciting and engaging. They can be interactive and catchy. But, what happens if the TV is on mute or the viewer is in another room. Internet ads are also there and then gone, not hard to miss. All of these methods are extremely expensive. When you consider the cost of a bundle of calendars, it’s hard to think why it is not worth trying.

So, assuming we’re all in agreement (you have to admit that this argument is pretty convincing), that calendars can an effective marketing tool and extremely cost effective, let’s start to design something that will give you the best chance to reap all of the rewards, which, we discussed above.

First, it is important that the calendar is aesthetically pleasing. If, it is not pleasing to the eye, it will not be looked at all that much
Design it so that your logo and information are in plain view
Specify certain times of years or dates that inspire action (For example, if you client is an accountant, perhaps include a reminder to send out flyers right before tax season)
Include special offers or reminders of your next catalog of brochure
Think of your customer, what do you think your client will be dwelling on on any given month. Be helpful, give tips based on their industry. This will gain trust and force them to look at it more often
Include URLs or or phone numbers that will lead them to products and services that will help them

There are many different factors like size, binding, and color to consider when designing a custom calendar. That’s where we come in. Contact us at mmprint.com today.

5 Interesting Ideas for your Custom 2016 Calendar

With the new year creeping up fast, it’s about that time to start thinking about your new calendar for 2016. With so many different options out there, it’s hard to narrow down exactly what kind of calendar to go with. Sometimes if you are ordering a large quantity, it may be worth it to go with a custom designed calendar for your office, team, organization or school. Everyone will love having a personalized calendar, and you have the freedom to make yours look and say whatever fits your project best.

The next tricky part is to pick the type and layout of your calendar. The standard size is 11″ x 8.5″ but there are plenty of other options you can choose to customize your calendar. Take a look at some of the following examples to spark your creativity for your 2016 calendar!

12″ x 12″ Square Calendars

These prominent wall calendars are perfect to display in conference rooms, large offices or anywhere that could use extra large pages. These look really nice wire-bound which is also a plus because they can lay flat if notes need to be made or events added.

Small 8″ x 8″ Calendars

We recently had a customer print their watercolor artwork on a smaller version of a wall calendar. These are perfect for cubicles or small desks that don’t have a ton of space to hang full sized calendars.

Die-Cut Calendars

If you want something that really stands out, consider what Land Rover did with this custom die-cut design. They created a topographic map that could be peeled off day by day, mimicking layers of the earth. A calendar like this is so successful because it pairs functionality with brand accentuation. A calendar like this would be different for every company, but could serve as a great marketing tool.

Visualized Calendars

There is nothing says that says the days of the year have to be printed on paper. Visualized Calendars are a creative concept that can take on many different shapes and forms. Look for other media that can represent your calendar – it will attract more attention than a traditional day counter and can draw more notice to your brand. The calendar below uses a rack-and-pinion-like system that can easily be rolled to represent each day of the month.

Full Spread Calendars

Most monthly spreads are set up to have a large picture at the top, and then a grid at the bottom representing all of the days of that month. This is used to write notes and add events to certain dates. In the digital age however, less people use physical calendars to schedule their lives. Instead, they will use their smartphones to plan their days and keep them better connected.

This doesn’t make the calendar obsolete though. The example above is a repurposed calendar that puts the focus on the artwork. Instead of splitting each page spread into two sections, they extended their artwork the length of the page and incorporated the calendar into the artwork. This design does not leave much room for someone to write on the display, but that is not always necessary. Instead, this layout plays to the aesthetic strength of the design.

Feel free to share your 2016 calendar ideas in the comments below, or head over to mmprint.com to get a quote for your calendar printing!